Dr Damigos >>>Successful Strategic Planning

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Successful Strategic Planning Successful Strategic Planning In times of great uncertainty, strategic planning must shift from a bureaucratic, linear process to a more targeted approach that is both analytic and creative...

Successful Strategic Planning

In times of great uncertainty, strategic planning must shift from a bureaucratic, linear process to a more targeted approach that is both analytic and creative.

by Richard Verity and Simon Mills

Strong strategic planning is critical to the success of every organization. It is the process by which strategy is translated into concrete short-term actions. It can also be a vehicle for deciding which markets are important to your company’s future, and which capabilities you will need to reach those markets effectively.
Over the years, the exercise of strategic planning has created strong advocates and fierce critics in equal measure. The recent financial crisis has renewed many people’s skepticism about strategic planning — as unimaginably bleak scenarios forced businesses to rapidly recast their most fundamental business assumptions and recalibrate their priorities. But there is no reason to be skeptical if you orient your strategic planning process to the unique needs of your company. Together, the following five pillars of corporate strategic planning ensure that your processes are up to the challenges of today’s dynamic business environment...

10 MUST Customer Management Trends

Customer Strategist Phil Winters: 10 Customer Management Trends to Act on Today

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Customer experience management is a key driver in terms of CRM, but not the only one. Recent developments in technology have unleashed a growing number of new customer management trends. Here are a few of the most important:
1. Consumers assume more and more control over their relationships with the companies they do business with. The challenge for corporations is to continue to delight consumers at every step of the decision-making process for a specific purchase, even when it is not possible to influence it directly.
2. Very early decision touchpoints and interaction between consumers now play a far greater role in the buying process. It's vital to know which touchpoints are relevant for your customers. Consider what each touchpoint means and which "moments of truth" will make a significant impact in the buying decision. Learn what customers are thinking at the early stages of the decision-making process, as well as what influences their buying decisions.
3. Social CRM is becoming integrated into total customer experience management. There is no doubt that social CRM will transition from being a standalone activity to one that needs to be integrated with their existing customer strategies. Determining which social CRM activities make sense for which customer segments - and deciding how to treat those activities - is the key to making use of social media tools.
4. A dearth of experts that truly understand customer analytics will force companies to produce and use customer insights differently. The days when a small team of experts owns the entire customer analytics process are coming to an end, necessitating and paving the way for a more holistic approach that involves more staff, at various organizational levels, in an environment where many can create and gain an advantage from customer insight, not just the chosen few.
5. In-house, outsourced or cloud platform? Technology options will not just be about total cost of ownership. Whether applications, databases, or infrastructure, real alternatives exist. However, the right choice will depend not on a total cost of ownership calculation alone, but also on a determination of how to best use the investment to ensure the take-up, acceptance, and learning throughout an organization, to meet its goals.
6. An increased focus on getting staff to embrace customer centricity. It's all about execution, and not just in marketing. Many senior executives, along with heads of sales and operations, are now realizing how critical it is for all parts of the organization to understand and proactively put the company's customer centricity investments to effective use.
7. Data - capturing it, managing it, making it usable - is now more important than ever. The data challenge has not gone away; if anything, it's gotten tougher. The volume and complexity of a company's various data sources can still mean the difference between a successful and a failed CRM initiative.
8. The focus of direct marketing will continue to shift away from a product push toward customer-optimized interaction. Organizations are quickly shifting to a mentality of getting the "best" action (for themselves as well as for their customers) and demanding a much higher return on their CRM investments. And consumers love the results.
9. Data privacy will shift from being a major roadblock to providing an important differentiator. Data privacy is still seen by many in direct marketing as the great show stopper. But nothing could be further from the truth. With a well-communicated policy, prudent organizations are seeing consumers actually granting permission to use more of their information, as long as it is sensibly done.
10. Customer intelligence will shed its studious, retrospective past to take on the role of informing and instructing an organization's interactive decision points - in real time. Customer intelligence was originally all about taking historical data, collected over time, and creating a few snapshots of "now and in the future." However, new data sources and new techniques are allowing organizations to make fact-based decisions on the fly, without having to wait the typical six to 12 months to gather enough data.

Phil Winters is an advisor with Peppers & Rogers Group. Contact him at pwinters@1to1.com

The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz: The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Products don't generate revenues.
Customers do.


But in order to satisfy customers and build the types of trusting relationships that will help companies maximize their revenue potential, organizations must first have properly motivated and engaged employees.
Employee engagement involves the steps that companies take to capture the hearts and minds of their employees, and motivate them to give their best effort to customers.
You can't become a customer-centric organization until you've become employee centric. Your company is only as strong and effective as your customer-facing staff. There will always be critical moments for your customers that no CRM suite or marketing script can address. Only an engaged, caring, customer-facing staff can handle these types of instances properly.
A highly-engaged employee typically feels more connected to the business and its performance. In fact, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, the level of employee engagement at companies that have achieved compound annual profit growth of at least 10 percent for a five-year period is more than 20 percent higher than at single-digit growth companies.
In addition to connecting customers with the right employees who are incented to fulfill their needs, companies realize other meaningful business benefits from having engaged workers. Employee turnover will be reduced, particularly in high-churn areas such as contact centers. HR costs will drop as companies have to devote less time and capital to recruiting new employees. That will also lead to lower training costs as companies retain longer-tenured, knowledgeable workers.
Nevertheless, the HR-related cost savings that stem from these actions pale in comparison to the impact that a highly engaged employee will have on cross-sell/upsell rates and other favorable business outcomes that result from happy, satisfied customers.

Customers at the Forefront of Strategic Planning

Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz: Place Customers at the Forefront of 2011 Strategic Planning

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Many executives are in the throes of the budget season, so their discussions with other decision-makers will invariably turn to strategy setting for the coming year. Given the current backdrop - a sluggish economy, the need to manage growing complexity in the multichannel environment, and increased opportunities for using customer data and analytics - executives should be thinking about growing their businesses through customer-centricity.
As companies set their revenue targets and other financial goals, executives can chart their strategies in a couple of different ways. They can choose to apply a short-term, product-centric approach that might enable them to meet their quarterly earnings targets. But in doing so, senior management runs the risk of alienating loyal customers by applying aggressive sales tactics in the drive to meet their numbers.
By comparison, a customer-centric method of strategy setting is a more balanced approach to engendering long-term customer value while driving greater loyalty and consistent revenue growth in the near term. In addition, a customer-centric approach will help companies to foster gains in customer lifetime value and customer profitability over the long haul.

Six Things Organizations Should Fix in 2011

Customer Strategist Wayne Kingston: The Six Things Organizations Should Fix in 2011

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

This year I've been involved at varying levels with some 50 Australian companies across verticals ranging from banking and finance to telecommunications to retail, pharmaceuticals, media, utilities, transport and logistics, and travel and entertainment. And I've talked with executives ranging from the CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, and CIO right through to receptionists and call centre operators. What I've learned is remarkably similar across most, if not all of them.
Here are the six I've selected as the things I'd most like to fix in 2011:

1. Organisations are too busy "being organizations" to truly address the needs of their customers. Most organisational structures are exactly that: structures. Very few firms are fluid enough to put the needs and wants of their customers ahead of the needs and wants of the executives who run them.

2. Most companies are still structured around "product silos" rather than customer segments. Their financial reporting systems are traditionally built around measuring their "return on products." Businesses using those financial systems find it very difficult to convert to measuring the "return on customers." And next to none are capable of measuring customer lifetime value.

3. Many executives are still confused by social media--or at the very least they are confused about how to capitalise on it. The more fragmented our media and channels to market become, the more confused our executives have become in deciding how to reach out to their customers.

4. Many customers are disillusioned with most of the companies they deal with. Customers today want and demand complete transparency. The days are gone that you can fool most of the people most of the time. Today they just have to Google you, or ask on Facebook whether you are pulling the wool over their eyes . And when is it going to sink in that customers demand to talk to real, local people and not to machines!

5. "Below the line" is now well and truly the new "above the line." Most CEO's are demanding more and more accountability for their marketing dollar, while most customers block out just about any message that is not directly relevant to them. Consequently, the company's customer database is now a major corporate asset.

6. And, last but not least, no company will fix any of the above until their respective CEOs assume the role of "chief customer officer." You can't delegate customer centricity. Unless the CEO is driving CRM (or what we prefer to call CEM, or customer experience management) the executives throughout the rest of the organisation will find it too hard to be truly customer centric. If only we were all Richard branson!

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About the Author: Wayne Kingston is a Managing Partner of Peppers & Rogers Group

How blue are the oceans? The Starwood experience

Robyn Pratt, Starwood An INSEAD article In search of blue oceans: The Starwood experience asks: Are companies using Blue Ocean Strategy to search for ‘uncontested market space’ and, if so, how? One group which has been exploring blue ocean thinking for the past three years is Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Jens Meyer In conjunction with Meyer, the company has developed a process through which employees are trained in Blue Ocean Strategy, effectively focusing on non-customers, before being given three to four months to apply the methodology. Projects are then proposed to the senior operating team at a so-called ‘Visual Strategy Fair’; black belts or master black belts then put together a business case to present those projects to the senior leadership team for a decision on whether to implement these.

How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

The book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant’ has had a huge impact worldwide. Written by two INSEAD professors, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, it sold more than a million copies within its first year of publication and has been translated into 39 languages, breaking Harvard Publishing records as the fastest selling book in print. In the lead up to writing the award-winning book, Kim and Mauborgne spent 15 years studying strategic moves by companies in more than 30 industries over a period spanning from 1880 to 2000. Traditionally competition has been at the heart of corporate strategy – country versus country, company versus company, and even business school versus business school.  The key question is usually how can a company outdo its rivals?

Increase revenue, reduce costs, gain efficiencies - Value Chain adding Activities

The value chain is a strategic planning concept developed by Michael Porter, and classifies the value-adding activities of an organization - the costs and value drivers are identified for each value activity. The aim is to maximize value creation while minimizing costs...